Purpose
The purpose is to examine how daycare teachers create pedagogical professionalism in the interface between their own professional ideals, ethical and pedagogical positions and an education policy increasingly focused on learning. The ambition is to contribute knowledge about the dominant truisms and discourses concerning pedagogical practice that exist in daycare, and examine how these conceptions work as conditioning options for daycare teachers in creating professionalism(s).
Result
The analysis shows how powerful reasonings from an education policy focusing on learning are also present in everyday life at the daycare institution, and how these types of reasoning cause conflict between daycare teachers. Overall, the author finds that pedagogical professionalisms are politically conditioned on four powerful mindsets that form an interface within which the daycare teachers can create pedagogical professionalism. According to the author, these four mindsets are determined by the four modal verbs must, could, should and would as well as four figures of reason which the author calls the Practician, the Strategist, the Idealist and the Pragmatist. The author finds that daycare teachers navigate differently in the interface between the four mindsets and thereby create professionalism in many different ways. According to the author, all four figures of reason thus play a greater or lesser role in the individual daycare teachers, but the ways in which the teachers relate to the different types of reasoning are different. In other words, pedagogical professionalism is expressed in how the daycare teachers individually balance and go beyond the different mindsets.
The author concludes that pedagogical professionalism is thus a paradox that stretches beyond the individual daycare teacher, and therefore is both a collective and an individual matter.
Design
The data material consists of interviews with four daycare teachers from one daycare institution, and interviews with the pedagogical leader of the institution, the district leader and the municipal head of administration. In addition, the author also included a number of transnational, national and municipal policy documents. Through three related sub-analyses, the author described different perspectives on how daycare teachers create professionalism. First, the author constructed narrative portraits of the four daycare teachers. Across these portraits, the author identified three local narratives, i.e. the daycare teachers' shared narratives and subjective conceptions about everyday practice at the institution. Similarly, the author constructed narrative portraits of the three leaders and identified three management narratives that helped frame the space within which the daycare teachers can create pedagogical professionalism. Finally, the author expanded the narrative analyses by examining how the four daycare teachers move in an interface that is significant for how they can construe themselves as professional daycare teachers.
References
Schmidt, C. H. (2017). Originale pædagoger: daginstitutionspædagogers faglighed(er) i lyset af en insisterende læringsdagsorden. Ph.d.-afhandling. Danmarks institut for Pædagogik og Uddannelse (DPU), Aarhus Universitet.